• The new AirPods work as clinical-grade hearing aids with a built-in hearing test that can replace traditional hearing aids.

• AirPods offer Adaptive Audio mode, dynamically managing noise cancellation and audio transition for a mixed reality audio experience.

• There is the potential to exceed human hearing levels with advanced headphone technology, leading to superhuman hearing capabilities.

It’s pretty normal these days to see someone walking around with a pair of wireless headphones plugging their ear holes, but thanks to the transmitted sound, we expect they’ll still be able to hear what’s going on. Still, if those buds could indeed make you hear what’s going on? Beyond what your mortal ears are capable of?

AirPods are now hearing aids

Apple has announced that it is offering AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro 2 clinical grade hearing aid functionality as part of an overall set of hearing health features, including a hearing test to see if you need help getting started. So now, even if you didn’t know you had hearing loss, you can be assessed and treated in one fell swoop. Now, I’m not ready to say that you can skip a visit to an audiologist just yet, but the idea that a pair of commercial headphones can help restore someone’s hearing is amazing to me, and while AirPods aren’t the cheapest buds out there I swear, compared to the cost of purpose-built hearing aids, Apple might as well provide them.

AirPods promise to mix your eco-sound in real time

In addition to acting as hearing aids, the AirPods 4 and Pro 2 also introduce something known as “Adaptive Audio” listening mode. It basically dynamically and intelligently combines noise cancellation and audio passthrough. So the headphones decide what kind of noises you should hear and how loud they should be. This means that it is not a situation, but almost like mixed reality for your ears.

Why stop at human levels of hearing?

So if headphones like these can help restore hearing loss and bring someone’s hearing back to normal hearing, why not use the same technology to overcome it? Why not give us the ability to hear things that are far away or amplify the sounds of low-volume objects in our environment? Imagine the same voice isolation technology that works for calls helping you hear someone speaking in a noisy environment.

Even better, it already exists headphones that translate languagesbut it would be great if this could also be integrated into mainstream products like AirPods. Given recent trends towards local AI processing on phones, this is yet another improvement on our regular hearing that could be normal in just a few years.

There’s always a bit of controversy when technology promises to improve some aspect of our bodies, but these are just wearables, so they’d be like sunglasses or binoculars, but for your ears.

A hidden path to human growth?

In SF, human augmentation generally refers to prosthetic limbs and implants, but we’ve been doing it since we’ve been human. Clothes make us more resistant to the cold, we have shoes that let us run further and faster, and the helmet is just an enlargement of the skull. So instead of making a full Iron Man suit, we’ve been expanding beyond what a bare human body can do for a while now.

Headphones that give you superhuman hearing powers are just a small example of this. I think we’re about to see augmented reality glasses they’re finally becoming practical and affordable, meaning people can wear them the way regular glasses do now. This will provide all sorts of improvements to both what we can see and what we know about our environments.

Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses

Embraced by the next generation of culture makers, its journey continues with AI-enhanced wearable technology. Listening, calling, capturing and live streaming functions are seamlessly integrated into the classic framework.

As each device we wear or wear on our bodies becomes more advanced, able to do something better about us, then eventually it could all add up to something that makes us significantly more capable than we would be otherwise. For now, I can’t wait to hear as Superman!